Venia Legendi

13 February 2009

If you have any interest at all in wonderfully strange and absurdly dangerous compounds, peruse this hilarious set of articles, entitled "Things I Won't Work With", by the chemist Derek Lowe

Among the lovely substances mentioned: chlorine trifluoride (hypergolic with most conventional fuels, virtually all organic compounds, and things like rock and sand); titanium tetraazide; anhydrous dichlorine heptoxide ("a liquid with a boiling point of around 80 C, and I'd like to shake the hand of whoever determined that property, assuming he has one left"); carbon diselenide (so mephitic that, when first synthesized, "the vapors [ . . . ] escaped the laboratory and forced the evacuation of a nearby village"), usw.

09 January 2009

For all its limitations, the Freedom of Information Act is one of the jewels of the American political system.

But I wouldn't want to be the person at the CIA charged with fielding FOIA submissions. The logs of recent requests (here, here, and doubtless many other places) make for amusing reading. Alongside serious demands for information, there are dozens of people asking for their own files, the obligatory questions about UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, and mind control, and requests for things that are already public and easily available (the CIA Factbook and the like). But that's just the tip of the iceberg. I pity the poor fellow who has to write responses to the requests summarized as:

"impact Visa card holders" (3 Jan. 2000) [recte visa holders?]

"assassination of President William McKinley or Leon Czolgosz" (12 Jan. 2000)

05 January 2009

Eric Posner is wrong about virtually everything involving politics or the law, but the opening sentence of his analysis of this op-ed by John Bolton and John Yoo in Sunday's New York Times expresses my feelings perfectly:

It didn’t take long for conservatives to rediscover limits on executive power. You’d think something — if not philosophical consistency, then at least manners — would cause them to hold off until, say, inauguration day.